“NewsWrap"
for the week ending January 19, 2008
(As broadcast on "This Way Out" program #1,034, distributed 1-21-08)
[Written by Greg Gordon, with thanks to Rex Wockner with Bill Kelley]
Reported this week by Rick Watts and Sheri Lunn
Three men in Cameroon have been sentenced to six months in prison at hard labor for being gay. They've been in jail since their arrests in the port city of Douala on August 31st when police officers were randomly searching for armed robbers.
One of the men confessed to being gay after being beaten at the police station, and implicated his two friends. According to Joel Nana of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, or IGLHRC, "As soon as the shadow of homosexuality enters into a case due process goes out of the window."
Article 347 of the west African country's penal code punishes consensual same-sex relationships with up to three years in jail, but the men's lawyer, Alice Nkom, told reporters that she would appeal the convictions because none of them were found guilty of committing homosexual acts, and “the court cannot condemn them for something they never did."
More than 30 people have been jailed in Cameroon in the last two years on charges of homosexuality, despite an October 2006 ruling by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that such arrests violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The country's national LGBT rights group Alternatives-Cameroon has been joined by Amnesty International, IGLHRC and other human rights organizations in calling for the repeal of Article 347, the release of all people detained under that law, and an end to official discrimination based on sexual orientation in that country.
The north African country of Morocco is also a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but an appeals court there this week upheld the December convictions of six men who were charged with “lewd and unnatural acts” for taking part in what the local press called a “gay wedding.” The men, who range in age from 20 to 61 years old, had appeared in a widely circulated online video, including on the popular “YouTube” site, that authorities said also showed a man in a dress dancing at the party.
Homosexual acts in Morocco are punishable by up to three years in prison. Western human rights groups who monitored the original proceedings said that no evidence was offered that any of the six men, who each pleaded not guilty, had actually engaged in such illegal acts. The man described as the organizer, who was also convicted of serving liquor illegally, was sentenced to 10 months behind bars. The others received six-month sentences. The appeals court did reduce the prison sentences for all but the organizer to four months.
Philip Luther, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa program at Amnesty International, called the men's convictions a travesty, and demanded their immediate release. He said his group is also concerned about their personal safety after that happens. "The public controversy sparked by this case in Morocco,” he said, “begs for an urgent review of the country's discriminatory laws which criminalize homosexuality."
A South Korean riot policeman has come out on a police community Web site, raising new questions about the treatment of lesbigay service personnel in the country.
Using a pseudonym, Private Kim Hyun-jong wrote that coming out was difficult, but that it was an important issue for the South Korean military. Kim, who works at a police station in Seoul, told “The Korea Times” that his announcement was not well received by his colleagues, and that “I heard many talking behind my back describing me as a 'dirty' gay man.'"
All South Korean men are required to serve in the military or in the riot police for up to two years. Same-gender sexual activity is a serious offense under the country's military codes, and gay men have been regularly sent to mental institutions. Several men have been kicked out of South Korea's military for homosexuality in recent years, and in 2006 a soldier who had attempted suicide claimed that he was ordered to submit photographs of himself in bed with another man and forced to take an HIV test after he came out to superiors.
While there are no references to homosexuality in the South Korean Constitution or Civil Penal Code, anti-queer discrimination is fairly common in the conservative country, which is dominated by strict Confucian tradition and strongly influenced by the Roman Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, U.S. Army Sergeant Darren Manzella, who came out on the CBS-TV program “60 Minutes” last month, complete with a video of himself and a former boyfriend kissing, is still on active duty.
Manzella worried that would get him kicked out of the military under the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy, which says lesbigay members can serve only if they keep their sexual orientation a secret.
"I thought I would at least be asked about the segment,” he told the “USA Today” newspaper, “or approached and told I shouldn't speak to the media again." But, he says, that hasn't happened.
His case apparently is not unusual. The U.S. military queer advocacy group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network says there are now a record number of openly lesbigay members of the military -- at least 500 that the organization knows about.
Discharges under “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” have fallen sharply since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
In other U.S. news, the City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts voted unanimously this week to elect the nation's first Black openly lesbian mayor.
Denise Simmons, a member of the Council since 2001, will succeed Ken Reeves, who had been the country's first Black openly gay mayor.
With a population of about 100,000 and located on the outskirts of Boston, Cambridge is home to both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The city's perhaps more famous namesake in England made history of its own last year when its councillors chose a transgender woman as mayor.
U.S. Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, who was arrested last June for allegedly seeking sex with an undercover cop in a Minneapolis airport men's room, has presented some new legal arguments in his quest to have his disorderly conduct guilty plea reversed by the Minnesota Court of Appeals. He originally admitted to the lesser offense to avoid being slapped with a more serious lewd conduct charge.
In a brief filed last week, Craig's lawyers argued that Minnesota's disorderly conduct statute requires that "others" be offended by the defendant's actions and, in Craig's case, only one other person was involved, undercover cop Sergeant Dave Karsnia. Craig's attorneys also claimed that Karsnia couldn't have been upset by Craig's actions, which allegedly included peering through a crack into Karsnia's stall, tapping his foot invitingly and repeatedly sliding his hand under the stall divider - moves well-known among bathroom cruisers - because Karsnia was tapping his own foot enticingly.
Craig, who's voted against every piece of legislation that would advance LGBT equality, continues to insist that he isn't gay or bisexual, even after “The Idaho Statesman” newspaper published the stories of eight men who claim they had sex with him or experienced sexual come-ons from him.
And in what several pundits have described as a case of “strange bedfellows,” the American Civil Liberties Union defended Craig in a court filing this week, citing a 38-year-old Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms "have a reasonable expectation of privacy," and that his alleged actions were therefore not illegal.
"The government cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” the ACLU wrote in its brief, “that Senator Craig was inviting the undercover officer to engage in anything other than sexual intimacy that would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom."
Craig initially said he would resign following the revelations of his disorderly conduct guilty plea, but has since vowed to fight to overturn the conviction and finish his term, which ends in January 2009.
And finally, at least from the perspective of LGBT civil rights advocates and their supporters, Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who's seeking the Republican presidential nomination, may be the scariest of all the GOP contenders.
Huckabee, who won the Iowa Republican caucus vote and is giving Mitt Romney, John McCain, and others a run for their money, told a TV interviewer in December that "People who are gay say that they're born that way... We may have certain tendencies, but how we behave and how we carry out our behavior [is a choice]."
In an interview this week with “Beliefnet,” an online religious site, Huckabee said he wanted to outlaw abortion, and compared same-gender marriage to bestiality. "I don't think that's a radical view, to say we're going to affirm marriage," he said. "I think the radical view is to say that we're going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal."
And speaking at a campaign rally in Michigan on January 14th, Huckabee told supporters that:
[sound] “I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do - is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”
Even the lesbigay Log Cabin Republicans have condemned Huckabee's remarks. In a statement this week, its president, Patrick Sammon, criticized “the Governor's pattern of ill-informed and extreme statements. Governor Huckabee should remember it's 2008, not 1968, and he's running for president, not preacher.”
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